On 2/07/2013, at 12:00 AM, Richard Cobbe wrote:
Sure. So my first question boils down to which of the two alternatives below does the community prefer? (To be clear about the intended semantics: this is the application of the function f to the arguments x, y, and z.)
f x y z
This (a) clearly violates the Golden Rule of Indentation and (b) Goes out of its way to confuse human readers. I do not know any indenting program that would tolerate such a layout for C or Lisp.
or
f x y z
Both are correct, in most contexts.
What part of "y and z are PARTS of f x y z and so SHOULD BE INDENTED relative to the whole expression" is hard to understand? If by "correct" you mean "will not confuse a Haskell parser", you're right. If you mean "will not dangerously mislead human readers", only the second form is acceptable. I do not trust any program to do my indentation. And let's face it, if your Haskell functions are big enough that manual indentation is a big issue, they are too big.